EuroPython 2010 Tutorial

Time, date and location

This tutorial will take place on Saturday 17th July, from 2pm to 5.45pm in Lecture Room 2, the Birmingham Conservatoire, Birmingham, UK.

Installed software

Participants should bring with them a laptop computer with the following installed:

  1. The Firefox web browser, with the Firebug add-on.

  2. A programmer’s editor, preferably with a JavaScript mode.

  3. A command line JavaScript interpreter.

    • For Linux I suggest SpiderMonkey.

      $ sudo apt-get install spidermonkey-bin   # Ubuntu
      
    • For Windows and Mac I suggest JSDB, from http://www.jsdb.org/download.html. It also works on Linux.

  4. This documentation, downloaded from Bitbucket downloads.

  5. The Python documentation, download from Python docs site.

Timetable

The tutorial consist of two 90 minutes sessions, separated by a 15 minute break.

I hope to run six sessions, each 30 minutes long. I hope each session will be 15 minutes of me talking followed by 15 minutes of programming.

The topics I’m intending to cover are

We start at 2pm prompt, with software already installed if possible.

  1. Demonstration and discussion of the counters example application.
  2. JavaScript gotchas.
  3. Objects and inheritance, class basics.

Here we have a 15 minute break.

  1. JavaScript’s this pseudo-variable (including call and apply).
  2. Closures, modules and memory leaks.
  3. Delegation.

We finish at 5.15pm.

Is this tutorial for me?

This tutorial aimed at Python web developers who already know a bit of JavaScript, and who need to understand JavaScript better.

The tutorial has two related objectives. One is a good understanding of the counters example. The other is a good understanding of the things that make JavaScript so different from Python (apart from JavaScript being the only language supported by web browsers).

If you’re thinking of taking this tutorial take the Gotcha quiz and read through the Counters example. If you understand what’s there a bit, and would like to understand it more, then this tutorial is for you.

Let me know

If you’re going to attend the tutorial, I’d appreciate an email from you that tells me a little bit about yourself and what you’d like to get from the tutorial. If you have specific questions about JavaScript, I’d like to here them also. (I can be contacted at Jonathan.Fine1 at gmail.com.)

You can also, I believe, just turn up on the day, if there is space. Don’t forget to install the software on your laptop.

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JavaScript for Python Programmers

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